The Map of Bones. Francesca Haig
never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
They drive us to the blighted land
Then bleed us with their tithes,
And if you go to the refuge
They’ll take your very lives.
The taboo has been forsaken
Within the refuge walls.
The machines have been awakened
And the Council plans to tank us all.
Oh, you’ll never be hungry, you’ll never be thirsty
And the Council’s tanks will have no mercy.
Oh, you’ll never be tired, you’ll never be cold
And you’ll never ever ever grow old,
And the only price you’ll have to pay
Is to give your life away.
When Leonard and Eva had played for us in the morning, we’d whooped along with some of the fast jigs, and clapped after some of the pieces where Leonard’s fingers had been at their swiftest. But none of us clapped now. The last notes slipped away, between the trees that encircled us like a gathered crowd. Our silence was the song’s best testament.
I wanted to send something into the world that wasn’t fire, or blood, or blades. Too many of my actions in recent months were bloodstained. The song was different – it was something we had built, rather than destroyed. But I knew that it was still a risk. If Leonard was caught, the song would hang him as surely as any act of violent resistance would. If Council soldiers heard him sing, or traced the treason back to him, the song would wind itself around his neck sure as a noose, and it would be his dirge, and Eva’s. Their twins’, too.
‘It’s a brave thing that the two of you’re doing,’ I said to Leonard, as we were packing up the camp in the dark.
He scoffed. ‘People fought and bled, on the island. I’m just an old blind man with a guitar.’
‘There are different kinds of courage,’ said Piper, emptying a flask of water on the fire, to ensure no telltale embers remained.
We said farewell to Leonard and Eva when we reached the road. A quick pressing of hands in the dark, and they were gone, heading east while we went west. Leonard was playing his mouth organ again, but distance rapidly dampened the music.
Over the next few days I found myself humming the chorus as I sharpened my dagger, matching the blade’s rasp to the beats of the song. I whistled the tune as I gathered wood for the fire. It was only a song, but it took hold in my mind like the ragweed that used to take over my mother’s garden.
I’d never seen anything like the Sunken Shore. When we arrived, after five nights of walking, it was dawn. Below us, it looked as if the sea had crept gradually inwards, the land surrendering in messy increments. There was no clear point where the sea met the land, like in the steep cliffs that Kip and I had seen on the south-west coast, or even in the coves near the east coast’s Miller River. Instead there was only a jumble of peninsulas and spits, divided by inlets that grasped inland like the sea’s fingers. In some places, the land petered out into swampy shallows before giving in entirely to the sea. Elsewhere, low islands were humped with straggled grey-green growth that might have been grass or seaweed.
‘It’s low-tide now,’ Piper said to me. ‘Half of those islands will be under by noon. The shallows of the peninsulas too. If you get caught out on the wrong spit of land when the tide turns, you can find yourself in trouble.’
‘How does Sally live here? They haven’t allowed Omegas to live on the coast for years.’
‘See out there?’ Piper pointed to the farthest reaches of the broken coast, where the spits of land gave way to the water, a series of loosely linked islands barely keeping above the encroaching sea. ‘Right out there, on some of the bleaker spits, it’s too salty to farm and too swampy for good fishing, and paths are there one minute and gone in the next tide. You couldn’t pay Alphas to live out there. Nobody goes there. Sally’s been hiding out there for decades.’
‘It’s not just the landscape that keeps people away,’ Zoe said. ‘Look.’
She pointed out, further still. Beyond the scrappy spits of land, something in the water was glinting, reflecting the dawn back at itself. I narrowed my eyes and peered out. At first I thought it was some kind of fleet, masts massed in the sea. But they ignored the sea’s shifting and stayed perfectly motionless. Another glint of light. Glass.
It was a sunken city. Spires impaled the sea, the highest of them reaching thirty yards above the water. Others were barely glimpsed – just shapes at the surface with angles too precise to be rocks. The city went on and on, some spires standing alone, others clustered near to one another. Some seemed still to have glass in windows; most were just metal structures, cages of water and sky.
‘I took Sally’s boat out there once, years ago,’ Piper said. ‘It goes on for miles – the biggest of the Before cities that I’ve seen. Hard to imagine how many people must have lived there.’
I didn’t need to imagine. I could feel it, now that I was staring at the glass-sharpened sea. I could hear a submerged roar of presence, and absence. Did they die by fire, or water? Which came first?
We slept for the day on a promontory looking over the patchy welter of land and ocean. I dreamed of the blast, and when I woke I didn’t know where I was, or when. When Zoe came to rouse me for the last lookout shift before nightfall, I was already awake, sitting up with my blanket wrapped around me and my hands clutched together to quell their shaking. I was aware of her watching me as I walked to the lookout post. My movements felt jerky, and my ears still rang with the roar of the ravenous flames.
It was high tide, the sea had engulfed most of the furthest spits, leaving a network of tiny hillocks and rocks jutting out, so that the water was curdled by specks of land. The sunken city had disappeared altogether. Then, as the darkness advanced, I watched the tide retreat again. Lamps were lit in the Alpha villages on the slopes below us.
It wasn’t the underwater city that I was thinking of, as I watched the tide go out, the sea slinking away like a fox from a henhouse. I was thinking of Leonard’s passing comment that The Confessor had come from the Sunken Shore. Somewhere, only a few miles down the sloping coastline, was the place where she and Kip had grown up. She would have been sent away when they were split, but Kip had probably stayed on. This strange landscape would have been his home. As a child, he would have roamed these same hills. Perhaps he’d climbed up to this very viewpoint, and seen the tide go out, as I saw it now, more and more of the land being exposed to the moon’s gaze.
When it was full dark I woke Zoe and Piper.
‘Get up,’ I said.
Zoe gave a low groan as she stretched. Piper hadn’t even moved. I bent and yanked the blanket off him, throwing it down at his feet as I headed back to the lookout point.
We couldn’t risk a fire, within sight of the villages below, so we ate cold stew in the darkness. While Piper and Zoe packed up their things, I stood with my arms crossed, kicking at a tree root. Finally we moved off down the hill, towards the rich green slopes that edged the deepest inlets. We walked in silence. When, after a few hours, Piper offered me the water flask, I grabbed it without speaking.
‘What’s got you in such a foul mood?’ said Zoe.